Restorative Approaches when working with vulnerable people of all ages in Residential Settings and Day Care Units.

- Team Support - building a sense of belonging

- Building trust and rapport with residents and /or service users

- Conflict Resolution

- Mediation

- Problem Solving Circles

Everyone in a residential care setting or a day care unit has certain needs to be able to give of their best. These needs are often expressed as essential values – they are essential because they relate to what we need as human beings to function well together. They are often needs shared in common by staff, service users and their families.

These needs are remarkably similar regardless of age or status, role or position. They include

When these needs are unmet, or are ignored or violated, then people can become sad, resentful, hostile and behave in very negative ways towards others. This behavior in turn has a knock-on effect on those around them.....

.....Like ripples on a pond

A downward spiral of conflict and increasingly damaged relationships can impact on the whole community – be it a school, a care home, a day care facility, an office or workplace.

Examples from from the Looked After Sector

More and more residential Children's Homes are transforming the culture of their building by introducing restorative approaches .County Durham has ensured all its care staff have received adequate training and so has Norfolk, to name two examples.

Statistics show that young people in care are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice arena. Many children in care have numerous unmet needs that put them at greater risk of engaging in offending behaviours inside and outside their Home. However this troubling situation has arisen not necessarily because children in care are more likely to offend, but because, in the absence of effective alternatives, the response of care staff to extremely disruptive behaviour has often been to call the police. When officers arrive they may feel obliged (again, in the absence of effective alternatives) to deal with the behaviour as if it were a crime. It has been argued that using a restorative approach instead can divert children in care from the criminal justice system by ensuring that the incident is dealt with by staff in such a way that both wrongdoer and those affected reach a mutually agreed way forward without recourse to the police.

This was the rationale, several years ago, for introducing a formal process called ‘restorative conferencing’ into certain children’s homes. This process involves both ‘victim’ and ‘offender’ (sic) meeting in the company of their immediate community (parents or carers) and anyone else directly affected by the incident. All those present recount their perspective on the situation, their feelings, what they need to enable them to move on as individuals and how to put things right. Soft evidence suggests that this formal process can be highly effective. It requires time for preparation since the facilitator needs to meet with each participant individually before the meeting, which can itself be quite lengthy.

Staff in residential child care settings soon discovered that this more formal process was less useful than they had hoped, because most of the incidents they needed to address flared up quickly and required immediate attention. They requested training in a range of less formal processes, which were, nevertheless, informed by the philosophy of restorative justice. Their experiences in using these processes have gradually led to a realisation that the approach requires a cultural shift in the way staff and young people interact on a day-to-day basis and that the benefits of using this approach go far beyond the narrow remit of reducing potentially offending behaviour.

Read more about this in the National Children’s Bureau publication written by Belinda Hopkins

Link ........

Read even more in Belinda’s book Just Care, the only book yet to be published about how to introduce a restorative culture into a residential care home. The courses we offer are care staff and foster carers are based on the content of this book, and all attendees on these courses receive a copy of this book.

Although the book was written for the Looked After Sector it has much of relevance for staff working with vulnerable adults of all ages.

We base our programmes for residential care staff and foster carers on our

Restorative approaches do not have the monopoly on skills and strategies for developing safe harmonious classrooms and staffrooms. However their Unique Selling Point (USP) is what it offers people when things go wrong. They utilise the same relational skills people need to make relationships in the first place to respond when these relationships need to be repaired and harm needs to be addressed. Without the pro-active emphasis on developing relationship skills both young people and staff will struggle to respond appropriately in the heat of the moment.

As one of our trainers says -

“Skills learnt and practiced in times of peace become automatic in times of war”

So what is unique about a restorative approach to conflict and challenging behaviour?

Many so-called ‘discipline issues’ in schools or residential settings either stem from, or result in, inter-personal conflict, which leave two or more people feeling angry, hurt, resentful, anxious or even afraid.

Reflection, Challenge

& Fun

Our Courses

We are signatories to the Restorative Justice Council’s National Trainers Code of Practice which means that all courses are based on the appropriate National Occupational Standards for Restorative Practice for that module.